Controlling London's Growth: Planning the Great Wen, 1940 - 1960

By Donald L. Foley

The story recounted here--that of efforts in recent years to plan for Greater London--is both unique and important. It concerns a world metropolis that, faced with an urgent need to rebuild its war-damaged central areas while still at war, prepared a notable set of special plans. And it describes subsequent vigorous efforts to carry these plans into effect. The London record is singularly impressive, unmatched by metropolitan planning efforts elsewhere. It has implications for metropolitan areas in other countries that are seeking solutions to comparable problems--problems reflecting unanticipated growth, technological and functional change, governmental chaos, and the reformulation of social requirements. Foley presents the first comprehensive factual analysis--British or otherwise--of the London planning experience. He offeres and original, sophisticated discussion of the social doctrine incorporated in the plans, and explains its emphasis on the principle of "containing" metropolitan London. He examines the context within which this doctrine emerged, investigates the suitability of this doctrine in the light of subsequent developments, and discusses possibilities for a fresh look at the main planning policies for Greater London. His approach gives the book depth without turning it into a specialized academic treatise. It speaks directly to thoughtful city-dwellers who are concerned to control rather than to be controlled by their environment. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520312111

Donald L. Foley

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Controlling London’s Growth

Controlling

London’s Growth

PLANNING THE GREAT WEN 1940-1960

By Donald L. Foley

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 1963

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Cambridge University Press

London, England

© 1963 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-19958

Printed in the United States of America

To Katharine, Thomas, William,

Margaret, and Judith—

CO-RESEARCHERS OF LONDON

But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, the metropolis of the empire? … The dispersion of the wen is the only real difficulty that I see in settling the affairs of the nation and restoring it to a happy state.

WILLIAM COBBETT, Rural Rides, Journal entry, December 4, 1821

Sixty years ago a great Englishman, Cobbett, called it a wen. If it was a wen then, what is it now? A tumour, an elephantiasis sucking into its gorged system half the life and the blood and the bone of the rural districts.

LORD ROSEBERRY, speaking as Chairman of the London County Council, March, 1891

The continued drift of the industrial population to London and the Home Counties constitutes a social, economic and strategic problem which demands immediate attention.

Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, January, 1940

The fundamental question is not How can the growth of London be stopped? but How can London’s abounding vitality be guided and directed for the general good through the medium of self-government?

Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London 1957-60, October, 1960

Preface

Problems reflecting the agglomeration of vast metropolitan supercommunities, by no means confined to any few nations, are becoming increasingly acute. And despite the already serious manifestations—congestion, physical obsolescence at the center, rampant outer sprawl, political chaos, and fiscal crisis—we are confronted with the appalling realization that, if anything, the situation may be due to worsen. In general, our efforts to cope have been too little and too late. To date the American record in effectively guiding metropolitan development has remained clearly discouraging. Problems are separately grappled with and ad hoc measures alleviate total breakdown, but we have lacked positive, comprehensive planning of metropolitan areas. This study reports and analyzes the tremendously significant and highly unique experience in seeking to fashion and put forcefully into effect such guidance for metropolitan London. Although directed primarily to an American audience—whether city planners, scholars, politicians, or interested citizens—standing to benefit from knowledge about the London experiment, the book also offers an interpretative account of the planning for Greater London not previously available to British readers.

The report is built around two questions: What are the main social policies incorporated in the plans for metropolitan London? How effectively have these social policies been carried out in the face of subsequent development forces? The study is accordingly selective in several respects: it reports primarily on the advisory plans prepared in the 1940’s and the degree to which their ideas have been carried into effect, it is mainly concerned with planning at the regional level, and it dwells on social policy considerations. It is neither a general commentary on British town planning nor a definitive history of the planning for London during recent years.

In the study I seek to show the influence of certain ideas, the crystallization of a reinforcing web of these ideas into doctrine, and the need to review this doctrine in the light of ongoing experience. Some of my interpretations may, in themselves, appear unduly critical. Let me hasten to make clear that I consider the plans for London, the planning system for carrying them out, and the accomplishments as singularly impressive pioneering. No single example of planning for any large American metropolitan area can match the London experience and results. The very uniqueness of this planning effort affords to this particular story an urgent significance.

I have undoubtedly brought to the study and its reporting more personal biases than I am able to recognize, and it may be appropriate to indicate some that I do sense. I am very fond of London and identify with the incredibly challenging task of respecting its traditional features while introducing needed changes. I greatly respect the integrity and the social maturity of the British leaders who have had the responsibility of planning for London. I appreciate the primary place assigned in Britain to political determination of major policy issues, yet also respect the importance of market-place decisions.

I have faith in physical planning and see an important place for leadership by planners as professionals, while also honoring their advisory relation to elected political officials. But I become impatient with traditional planning approaches if they remain unduly geared to preserving patterns reflecting earlier forces. Planning must permit—and, indeed, facilitate—growth and change. Undoubtedly I hold a bias, characteristically American perhaps, favoring growth and shunning policy deliberately restraining growth. Yet I have sought to be fair in my review of the London planning situation. I have tried to be openminded to the possibility that holding down London’s growth may be a most appropriate approach in Britain even though such a policy might not be equally relevant for American metropolitan areas.

Residing within some four hundred miles of the great metropolitan experiment, Los Angeles, I cannot help but be impressed with the importance of the automobile and with the forces in motion making for much looser and decidedly less focal metropolitan spatial patterns than we have hitherto witnessed or thought desirable. But I also believe in the critically important role of public transit (and was, of course, delighted with the marvelous public transport system serving London). If we are to be effective in positively influencing the future patterning of large metropolitan areas, we must be ready in advance with guiding concepts that may depart from traditionally accepted precepts.

My acknowledgments are many and heartfelt. The necessary and wonderful 1959-60 academic year in London was made possible by a faculty research grant from the Social Science Research Council; a grant from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of California, Berkeley; and a sabbatical leave of absence from the University. I am indebted to the London School of Economics and Political Science, and particularly to Professor W. A. Robson, for extending full staff privileges, including an office amid already overcrowded conditions. My other British debts are numerous; with some fear that I may neglect persons also deserving to be mentioned, I particularly express my gratitude to Professor Donald G. MacRae, Mr. S. J. Gould, Professor Peter Self, Mr. J. R. James, Mr. J. F. P. Kacirek, Mr. A. G. Powell, Mr. Richard Edmonds, Mr. Brandon Howell, Mr. Lewis Keeble, Mrs. Ruth Glass, Mr. Wyndham Thomas, and Mr. W. L. Waide for their friendly counsel. To Mr. Derek Senior, Dr. Nathaniel Lichfield, Professor T. J. Kent, Jr., and Professor Catherine Bauer Wurster, who were stalwart enough to read and comment most helpfully on drafts, I am most grateful. Mr. Irving Silver, Mrs. D. J. Sinclair, and Miss Clare Cooper provided research and cartographic assistance.

Mrs. Howard Harawitz bore the main final typing responsibilities, Mrs. James Petras and Mrs. Philip Davis typed parts of manuscripts, and Mrs. Sallie Walker effectively handled many arrangements.

Material from my own previous articles in the British Journal of Sociology, the Town Planning Review, and the Journal of the American Institute of Planners has been adapted, with permission. I wish also to express my appreciation to the University of Liverpool Press for permission to reproduce the MARS plan from the Town Planning Review and to George Allen and Unwin, the Macmillan Co. of New York, and Professor Robson for permission to quote from W. A. Robson (ed.), Great Cities of the World: Their Government, Politics and Planning. A much broader sphere of indebtedness is suggested by my rather extensive footnoting.

The responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the presentation and interpretation of the ideas and events reported remains my own.

D. L. F.

Berkeley, California

January, 1963

Contents

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Focus and Context

Chapter 2 The Advisory Plans and Their Main Ideas

Chapter 3 Doctrine Affirmed by the Plans

Chapter 4 Carrying Out the Plan: Governmental Machinery

Chapter 5 Carrying Out the Plan: Programs, Trends, and Results

Chapter 6 Modifying Major Plans and Policies

Chapter 7 Metropolitan Containment as Policy

Chapter 8 Doctrine and Change

Appendix

Notes

Index

Chapter 1

Introduction:

Focus and Context

London is a great and very special metropolis. It was probably the first of the world’s cities to cross the million mark—and this by about 1800.¹ It abounds in tradition reflecting its venerable history, and its physical make-up, particularly in its central parts, preserves much character from earlier architectural periods. It has played a unique and dominant role in Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, and, with many Victorian touches, recalls the memorable period of the Empire. London commands a particularly warm place in the hearts of countless millions, British and non-British alike.

Reflecting its historical significance and long evolving physical environmental setting, London strikes one as singularly unplanned. Indeed, London’s solid importance relates to a core of functional precincts that have evolved over the years—precincts characterized by tradition, historic continuity, workability, distinctiveness, and yet over all an amazing accessibility that collectively makes for metropolitan greatness. Men of importance in many fields of endeavor are readily able to be in face-to-face contact. London is so wonderfully complex that it can be tampered with only at great risk of upsetting a delicate ecological balance and a hard-come-by physical environmental heritage.

Yet one will do well to avoid a romanticism that belies the presence of serious problems. London’s very age spells obsolescence of physical plant, and large sections of London provide but mean living conditions. Private cars intrude impatiently, aggravating traffic congestion in street channels scarcely designed for the twentieth century. And suburban growth, reflecting ability to afford single-family homes and automobiles, threatens to despoil charming countryside. Two developments—the release of the Barlow Commission report in 1940 recommending that employment concentration in Greater London be halted, and the heavy bomb damage during the early war years—led the British to initiate new plans for metropolitan London while still in the throes of war and subsequently to carry major parts of these plans into effect. It is to the social purposes of these plans and to the ensuing, implementation of the goals and programs set by these plans that this report is directed.

The Unique Social Ideas of the London Advisory Plans

At the instigation of the central government, three longrange plans—for Greater London, for the County of London, and for the City of London—were prepared, released, and, except for the City of London Plan, approved as policy between 1941 and 1946. The Greater London Plan in particular, with the other plans complementary in spirit, proved to contain several revolutionary ideas and, further supplemented by other controls restraining new industry in the London area, provided a highly unique approach to planning metropolitan development. Had these plans restricted themselves to tidying up things in a manner more characteristic of most town planning or city planning, they might have lacked significance. But the Greater London Plan, reinforced by the other plans and by industrial location controls, boldly proposed that the growth of metropolitan London should be firmly controlled ²—physically by halting uncontrolled suburban spread and by limiting the density of development within particular districts, and socially and economically by preventing undue employment concentration. Several highly significant concepts and approaches—particularly a reliance upon a broad metropolitan green belt to encircle London, a ring of new towns just beyond this green belt, a determination to thin out central London, and a system of broad controls for dispersing residents and jobs out of central London and for decentralizing employment opportunities to other parts of Britain—were combined with other planning, reconstruction, and housing approaches to provide an interlocking Web of constructive ideas. The fashioning of this web, crystallized by the advisory plans, was creative social invention of high order. Once formed, it became the basis of social policy—and, in a more subtle fashion, the foundation of a highly influential body of doctrine³ providing a durable nucleus for political and professional consensus in town and regional planning circles and among the members of an informed elite more generally.

The plans, and subsequent planning doctrine, incorporated various social goals as to what kind of London was to be developed, what pattern of physical environment and what sort of urban life were to be promoted. Perhaps more important, the plans relied upon certain fundamental devices or concepts by which these goals were to be translated into attainable physical patterns. This study seeks to identify the social policies associated with the London advisory plans and to interpret the ascendency of these particular social policies in the light of the social-political context within which they emerged.

Since the plans were quite literally advisory only, it remained for their proposals to be carried out by subsequent measures. Another form of plan—the development plan—more precise and more closely geared to a comprehensive system of planning controls, came to be relied upon. Further legislation was required. And, as might be expected, varied possibilities for gaps and failures between advisory plan proposals and final effectuation abounded. The present study reports on how faithfully the plans have been carried out. It especially describes and seeks to analyze the development forces that have been at work in the fifteen years since the policies of the advisory plans were accepted, and examines how effectively the approaches recommended by the advisory plans stood up to the test of changing conditions. Too, the study deals pointedly with the institutional framework by which policy and doctrine are kept under surveillance and, as necessary, modified. It raises the question whether doctrine so ably evolved during the wartime period of plan preparation and public political discussion has been adequately subjected to basic review in the period to date.

The setting from which the advisory plans and the postwar reconstruction efforts emerged includes various aspects of London’s character and growth, national and local reform and social policy traditions, several pre-Barlow Commission developments regarding the planning for London, the central importance of the Barlow Commission recommendations, and the impact of the war. The brief review that follows attempts to deal with key events and factors only insofar as they relate to our main interest.⁴

London’s Functional Importance and Pattern

London is at once a world metropolis, the heart of the British Commonwealth, and the political, financial, commercial, and cultural capital of Britain. To create an even approximate American equivalent we would have to merge the New York, Washington, and Chicago metropolitan communities into one overwhelmingly dominant metropolis, compared with which all other metropolitan centers in America would appear provincial. As William A. Robson has aptly put it, London

is the place where the sovereign resides, where Parliament assembles, and the Cabinet meets. It is the headquarters of all the great government departments and the centre of the judicial system. It is the financial and commercial hub of Britain, the home of famous institutions like the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, or the Baltic Exchange. It is also a great manufacturing city. The port of London, with its thirty-six miles of quays, has the largest system of docks in the world. …

The cultural resources of London are immense. The great national collections housed there include the British Museum, the Record Office, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, and the Tate Gallery. The metropolis is the home of the Royal Society, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Inns of Court, and many other learned bodies. Most of the leading hospitals at which teaching and research are carried out are located in London. The University of London is the largest university in Britain and the principal centre for post-graduate study and research, to which students come from all parts of the world. London is the principal domain in Britain of dramatic and musical enterprise, of the opera and ballet, of film production and broadcasting. It is the directing centre for book, newspaper and periodical publishing. Its arenas provide the setting for many great sporting and athletic contests of national or international interest.⁵

Despite the rise of other important cities in Great Britain, London has maintained a most powerful influence in every phase of activity. The growth of central government has added to London’s political and economic base. Even the spread of various branch factories and regional offices of industrial, business, and financial firms to other parts of Britain and the growth of other British cities have enhanced the importance of the central offices in London charged with overseeing the national situation. London’s importance as a gateway for international travel has increased with the growing British reliance on the London airport. Indeed, at both domestic and international scales, London’s dominant position continues to be reinforced by the radial pattern of major transportation and communication channels converging on the capital.

London has historically enjoyed social and cultural advantages, with other British cities, in contrast, characteristically thought of as provincial. Even the climate of the London area is believed to be superior to that of, say, northern England. London has served as the great opportunity center for ambitious young persons, whether for clerical employment or more specialized careers. Granted important biases prevalent about the grimness of large cities, London has not fallen into the same class as industrial towns in Yorkshire and the Midlands. It is little wonder that there continue to be serious political objections to governmental policies that, even though indirectly, further improve London’s position vis-à-vis provincial cities.

I have spoken loosely of London or Greater London. As a basis for portraying growth trends of and within London, it is essential that we recognize several Londons, and this will further serve to describe something of London’s spatial and governmental structure. (See Figure 1.) The smallest—the ancient City of London— is but a square mile in area. Its government dates back nearly a thousand years, a charter having been granted by William the Conqueror in 1070.®

Since 1889 the County of London under the London County Council has constituted a much larger main unit of local government. Together with the City of London it forms the Administrative County of London, 117 square miles in area. The London

FIGURE 1

LONDON AND SOUTH-EASTERN ENGLAND

County Council constitutes a top-tier local government authority with strong powers, and within this lower-tier metropolitan boroughs and the City possess, or are delegated, lesser functions.

For census purposes, an area termed the Greater London Conurbation roughly delineates the main built-up part of the metropolis.⁷ This Conurbation has a radius of some 12 to 15 miles from Charing Cross, covers 722 square miles, and is virtually coextensive with the Metropolitan Police District. The part surrounding the Administrative County, termed for this study the Conurban Ring, comprises 605 square miles.

Some considerations involve even larger areas, embracing more than the contiguous urbanized suburbs. The Greater London Plan Region for which Abercrombie prepared the 1944 Plan, for example, embraces slightly more than 2,600 square miles, with roughly a 30-mile radius from the center of London. The inner parts of this Plan Region are clearly urban or suburban, but the outer rural parts are also within commuting range of central London. Some current approaches would place the more realistic radius of a London region at 40 to 50 miles, the area within which daily functional ties to central London, particularly through commuting, are maintained. A South-Eastern England Region is the broadest geographical unit of all, comprising an area of a roughly 50- to 70-mile radius. As employed in this discussion, it includes twelve counties⁸ and 10,558 square miles, 18 per cent of the area of England and Wales.®

London’s Growth to 1939

Because the advisory plans sought to cope with problems of population and employment concentration in the London region, some pointed consideration here of major long-range population growth and redistribution trends relating to London is essential. Several aspects of these trends deserve mention. That both the Greater London Conurbation and the South-Eastern England Region have grown significantly is shown in Table 1. By 1939 the Conurbation had grown to 8.7 million and another 5.9 persons resided in an encircling Regional Ring. This amounted to an increasing concentration, to the point where in 1939 the Conurbation constituted fully one-fifth of the population of England and the South-Eastern England